Students’ victory in housing battle


Aidan O’Toole, Coventry Socialist Students

Socialist Students in Coventry won a major victory for student accommodation on 11 November. We are plagued by high price, low quality and bad landlords. So we have been flying the banner for better housing.

Our motion to the Coventry all student meeting covered several points. We called for a Students’ Union (SU) letting agency to break the power of landlords: a non-profit organisation where all surplus is reinvested into accommodation.

Accreditation

We also called for the SU to work with local residents’ groups and the council to establish a mandatory accreditation scheme – so all landlords have to meet basic standards or be prosecuted. This would benefit all local residents and build solidarity between students and locals.

Our campaign to back the motion, with leaflets and stalls, was really popular. Because of our fighting stance on various issues, we already had three SU councillors and a National Union of Students delegate elected last year.

The motion was met with applause and cheers from most of the meeting. However, this cannot be said for bureaucrats in the SU council – one third voted against and encouraged the meeting to do the same with pointless, bureaucratic criticisms.

We told students not to let bureaucrats hijack the motion: vote the motion through and your Socialist Student councillors will see it happens.

The earlier applause and cheers were repeated when the motion was overwhelmingly passed. We won – and so can students in other universities.

■ Coventry Socialist Students’ victory follows a similar success in York. Socialist Students there led the campaign for York SU to set up its own non-profit lettings agency. Students then campaigned for and won the vote in the resulting referendum.